Anyone else tired of this Machiavellian approach that gives up on trying to persuade through rational and informed discussion?
The thing with Machiavellianism is that it works. The anti-Machiavellians are welcome to discourse with each other all day. But they'll take orders from those who manipulated the rules to get more rules passed. It has never been about who's right; it's about who wins.
There's a book called Congress and the Decline of Public Trust, published in 1999, which talks about this trend[2]. You can borrow it hourly on archive.org.
There's a paper from 1983 called The Decline of Confidence in American Institutions which discusses this as well[3]. People already knew about it during the mid 80s.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g...
[2]: https://archive.org/details/congressdeclineo0000unse/page/n5...
I'm reminded of that quote by Satre.
I'm tired of a system which structurally rewards a party if they are the party most willing to do this, and I'm also tired of the party with the worst policy positions also disproportionately setting policy because it is the most willing to do this.
You can't structurally reform your way out of the broken incentives without effectively using power within the system as it is, or replacing it from outside (the latter of which means violent overthrow, in practice). As inelegant as power politics within the system is, its a whole lot better than either rolling over and giving up, or than getting to structural reform by any other available means.
Edit: Also, a republic is a type of democracy.
Once people stop respecting something they coexist with, they start looking for ways to exploit it.
Blame McConnell's "power for power's sake" approach to the Senate.